New ideas to keep up with breakneck design developments
(Some corrections based on great feedback from some readers)
Emojis
There are currently a few standards to measure usability. They all need a usability redesign in my opinion:
1. Computer System Usability Questionnaire
2. Questionnaire for user interface satisfaction
3. Usefulness, Satisfaction and Ease of Use questionnaire
4. Product reaction card
These questionnaires look like they were made with Lotus 1–2–3 or a shipping terminal stacked with sad white containers.
Once again I would promote having emojis to save the day:
I would expect a better response from emojis (emojis are the language of emotions). Ironically this may actually lead to less ambiguity. I.e if you were to visit the unicode for emoji, it would detail what each emoji helps to represent: http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
Facebook is trying something similar with the like button replacement.
Or better yet, allow users to attach emojis to parts of the UI. That would immediately help to identify the good and bad parts.
Heart Rate
There are amazing advances in eye tracking technology and costs are decreasing. However I think heart rate monitors are more budget-friendly. Wearables such as Fitbit, Jawbone or Apple Watch (or any other equivalent) could help to provide a more objective feedback on the user experience.
I am quite certain frustrated users will probably have their hearts pounding, wanting to desperately strangle the person who designed it. I know I want to strangle someone whenever I have to use SAP.
I would agree that in terms of sensitivity the consumer wearable devices may not be ideal, however it does allow scaling up at lower costs. The wearable companies also have decent APIs to allow UX Developers to pull data for their tests. That would definitely be an interesting possibility to explore.
